‘You Just Earned 10 points!’: Gaming and Grinding at an Online Academic Conference

Abstract

Gamification is commonly defined as the application of a game layer to non-game contexts, such as work or education. It involves implementing a digital platform to turn ordinary organizational activities into fun, intrinsically motivating tasks. Empirically, this paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference – specifically, a ‘Conference Challenge’ that encourages participants to score points by engaging in conference-related activities. The challenge was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation, but instead it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of ‘grinding’, the game posed a moral dilemma for the players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. This suggests that the boundary between fair play and bad sportsmanship is permeable and contested, an insight that raises questions about the ethics of game-playing. We conclude by suggesting that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what’s already happening in the broader academic game that the conference is a part of.